Of Yarrow and Men: the Seasonal Alchemy of Human Decay

Disclaimer: Most of what I speak to in the world of human health isn’t universally accepted by many if any Western medicine or “holistic” practitioners. The former tend to be too steeped in reductive materialism. The latter more often than not struggle to define let alone practice “holism”. What follows in this essay is a different perspective on what is known as “flu season”, and I don’t even feel that it goes as deep as necessary to understand what we call “the flu”. I actually think my views in this very essay are in and of themselves still too materialistic, albeit a far cry from the allopathic, “Western” view of illness. In the age of social media and short attention spans, very few are able or willing to question dogma, and nearly everything that I read about in the conventional or alternative health spaces is self-masturbatory at best. This essay will please very few in its entirety, and I’m ok with that, because my true gnosis on this topic would hardly be valued by just about anybody, and I prefer not to shout into the void. I recommend you sit with any discomfort that arises upon read or listening to this essay. Maybe something new will emerge from our dialogue around these topics in the future if we can become more comfortable with the unknown.

Every autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, flu season arrives anew. Your local pharmacies and your doctors will begin offering a series of vaccines to “protect you” from some pathogen that isn’t even visible with an electron microscope. Generally speaking, these interventions are aimed to protect you from viruses.

The symptoms of the flu include fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headaches, and fatigue. These are symptoms of this so-called “illness” that afflicts many every autumn.

Meanwhile, as I’m looking out my window, my lettuces, herbs, wildflowers, wisteria, and maple trees have all discarded their leaves, stems, and flowers, sacrificial lambs to Mother Earth. She is rich in activity during the winter months, alchemizing this organic matter to support the abundance of new life that will arise come spring. We get to witness this beautiful circle of life every year.

Humans, who have long held that they are separate from nature, fortunately do not have to offer up our limbs and organs every year to Mother Earth. Thank goodness…because nature is metal. Those poor flowers gave their lives in order for life to spring anew when Mother Earth goes back into dormancy in the warmer months.

But why wouldn’t humans be included in this sacrifice to the great Mother every year? Could the symptoms of influenza “infection” reflect our participation in this annual offering?

Of apple trees, gravity, and levity

Anybody walking upright understands gravity. The apple tree grows, matures, and produces fruit. When the fruit ripens, it falls to the Earth.

In fact, everything in the cosmos gravitates towards massive objects, the Earth notwithstanding. This is what keeps our moon and satellites in orbit around our planet and what keeps our planet in orbit around the sun.

All biological organisms feel the pull of gravity, and yet what distinguishes life from non-life is that being alive seems to defy gravity. Rudolf Steiner referred to this gravity-defying force as “levity”.

But in the fall, the force of levity can no longer compete with gravity, and the sunflowers bow down to the Earth. They disintegrate, turn brown, and their constituent parts combine again with Mother Earth under the pull of gravity. When levity is sufficient, plants, animals, and humans remain upright and alive.

Levity might therefore be considered synonymous in many ways with life force energy. The Chinese called it qi. The Vedic traditions referred to it as prana or kundalini. Esoteric science calls it “etheric force”. Original homeopathy refers to this as “generative power”. But perhaps it’s all roughly the same thing…

When humans reach the end of their lives here on Earth, gravity takes over and when the embers of levity are extinguished, we die. We, too, are a part of this circle of life.

What if “the flu” is not an illness?

As a preamble to what’s to come, I am not going to argue that people don’t “get sick”. I’m simply going to reframe what is perceived as an “illness” instead as a normal part of our experience here on Earth.

I’ve already outlined what happens during the autumn season, which coincides with the advent of the flu season. The natural world experiences some degree of decay, but not totally.

My yarrow no longer has tall stems with leaves and flowers. But the roots remain along with some hearty leaves. There is still some activity in the plant that keeps it alive over the cold, winter months. In the spring, however, my yarrow will emerge anew. But this reemergence requires this plant to have been cared for during the warmer months so that it can sustain itself over the harsh winter. In other words, yarrow that has plentiful levity or life force energy will survive despite its offering of a great deal of its biomass back to Mother Earth. This is an act of love. This is also why herbal medicines are most often used to make us feel stronger throughout nearly any illness (e.g. Echinacea, slippery elm, licorice root, marshmallow root, wild cherry bark, and nearly every remedy included in the Wildcraft board game which is great for kids!).

Recall the symptoms of influenza “infection”. You are heating up (fever). And you are expelling a bunch of dead matter (skin, tissue, cells) back into the environment (coughing, sneezing, runny nose). This sounds a lot like what my yarrow experienced, just not in a form that we recognize as decomposition.

This dead biomass that we are expelling consists of cell debris, fluid, electrolytes and the rest of it. When you cough up phlegm, this mucus contains the debris of cells lining your oral and nasal cavities and your deeper airways. When cells die, they break open, releasing all of their contents, which includes the genetic material inside the nuclei of these cells. Take note of this for later…

Influenza deaths

Not all of my perennials will return in the spring. Some of them sacrificed so much in the fall that they left themselves bereft of life force energy (levity). When spring arrives, they simply can’t overcome gravity’s pull down to Earth.

I propose that the same happens in humans. After all, which of us are most susceptible to hospitalization and death from influenza? Older humans.

Older humans are already feeling the effects of diminishing levity. They are beginning to walk with a hunch. Their skin is thinning. Their blood vessels are weakening, and blood is pooling in their lower extremities. This is called aging. There never will be a cure for this any more than there will be a cure for “autumn”.

When healthy people enter flu season, many get these symptoms, which is an expression of our offering to Mother Earth, and then they recover, often feeling stronger than they had felt prior to their “illness”.

When many of our older humans get “sick” during flu season, they end up dying. The same goes for unhealthy people. Gravity, which must be quite strong in the colder months, wins in its tension with levity. This is life process in action: when levity is overwhelmed by gravity, you die.

This is why I harp so much on eating real foods, drinking living water, getting quality sleep, having good sex, connecting deeply with loved ones, and not putting poisons into your body otherwise: these acts of love for one’s self nourish your life force energy.

“I tested positive for COVID/the flu/etc.”

This is where things get uncomfortable.

You had flu-like symptoms. You went to urgent care. They swabbed your nose. The result was positive for [fill in the blank].

We have been conditioned to believe that an outside contagion made us sick, which is why the vaccines your doctor have offered you all of these years make sense. They are meant to protect you from these outside invaders which will kill you.

It’s hard to argue that point because they swabbed you and detected the bad guy, in this case influenza.

It’s possible that this is the case but unlikely.

Remember that the cells that die and then are coughed up and expectorated break open and release their genetic nuclear contents. I asked you to remember that. Keep it in mind going forward.

Our genetic material is arranged across 46 chromosomes, which are thought to be coiled chains of chemical base pairs called nucleotides. This is known as your “genome”. Across this genome, there are an estimated 3 billion nucleotides, and these 3 billion nucleotides come in four forms: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. The sequence of these nucleotides is going to be slightly different for every man, woman, and child. Plants, fungi, animals, and bacteria also have a genome, and it’s different from humans but not by much.

The story goes that groups of these nucleotides (genes) are transcribed into RNA which is translated into proteins. The nucleotides of RNA also come in four forms: adenylate, uridylate, guanylate, and cytidylate. Influenza A and B both have an estimated 14,000 nucleotides of the RNA variety.

Everybody knows that the human genome was fully sequenced 20 years ago, right?

Well…no. It hasn’t. Efforts for this massive undertaking began in 1990 through the Human Genome Project. Multiple drafts of the human genome have been published but at least 8% of the sequence was still unaccounted for for decades. There are still multiple errors, and the genetic material used to complete the sequence was from multiple genetic donors. Over the past few years, it is now thought that we might have the technology to sequence the entire human genome, but this is the same story that has been rehashed for decades. Indeed, as of 2026, the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium claims to have closed the 8% gap through long-read sequencing, but there are still unquestionably and admittedly a number of errors. Every time that we have heard a researcher claim to have sequenced the entire human genome (2001, 2003, 2022, etc.) it has been followed up with “…well, not quite”.

If humans are nearly identical and even chimpanzees and humans are 99% identical genetically, how can we ever assume that any fragment of DNA (or RNA) is from a plant, animal, human, or even a virus? Given that each of us has a distinct genetic makeup, we are far from completing this mission.

Swabs for viruses are likely useless

Given that there are thought to be around 3 billion nucleotides in the human genome and that we admittedly didn’t (and probably still don’t) know about 8% of the sequence, that’s 240 million spots in the code that we simply aren’t aware of. The influenza A genome is only ~14,000 nucleotides, so it’s a big leap to say that the swab they stuck up your nose is detecting something foreign because without a copy of any human genome sequence let alone your own personal genome, we don’t have anything to compare the swab to.

These viral swabs work in one of two ways: rapid antigen test or polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

Rapid antigen test: Goo is taken from your nose or airways and dipped into a buffer that breaks open a virus to release its proteins (“antigens”). The liquid is then added to a test strip coated with antibodies specific to these antigens. If proteins “stick” to the antibodies, then you have a match and the test is reported positive. The issue with this test is that it doesn’t work if there isn’t enough virus in the sample (“viral load”) and thus has a high false negative rate, so the PCR test is considered more accurate.

PCR: Same collection process only this time the lab uses polymerase to photocopy any genetic material present in the sample (rather than searching for antigens). If X number of cycles of this photocopying get you a sequence that is thought to be unique to influenza A, then your result will be reported as positive for influenza infection.

There are other molecular techniques that are used, but this process of swabbing and diagnosing isn’t new, and understanding its shortcomings really matters.

Distinguishing self from other is impossible if I don’t know your genomic sequence

I have heard the following analogy from Tom Cowan, MD, to illustrate why we need to know the human genomic sequence for this viral screening process to make sense.

If I placed a hand grenade inside a metal garbage can with a copy of War and Peace, the book would explode into a billion tiny pieces. If I then asked my wife to arrange those tiny pieces into War and Peace, it wouldn’t be possible unless she had a copy for comparison’s sake. Otherwise, she would probably be able to form a bunch of coherent sentences and maybe even create a story from those sentences but there would probably be a lot of pieces left over, and we certainly wouldn’t have a complete copy of War and Peace.

This analogy is fitting because genetic material from the dead cells that are sloughing off in your airways is also floating around in those same passageways as this supposed viral RNA that is being caught by the swab and then run through PCR multiple times.

If the viral RNA sequence is A-U-G-C, how can we be sure that that sequence isn’t simply a fragment of our own genome?

With the human genome still a mystery to “science”, assigning causation to an external virus for your flu-like symptoms is ridiculous. It may be useful in the future, as the idea is compelling, but we don’t yet have a reliable copy of the human genome to accurately distinguish human genetic material from viral.

By the way, the same rationalization can be made against the COVID-19 swabs that people continue to stockpile or the HPV swabs that women receive at their well-woman visits. Is this innate genetic material or a genetic sequence from an outside invader (e.g. COVID, human papilloma virus)?

Can you catch a cold?

There is one additional element of this conversation that muddies the waters of my argument.

If you went home for the holidays, there was likely a small child who had a runny nose and a cough. You are getting coughed on, spit on, and booger-ed on for the entire visit. To nobody’s surprise you developed flu-like symptoms in the days after your Christmas dinner.

How did this happen? Did the child spread the virus to you? After all, viruses like influenza are well-known to jump from person-to-person or sippy cup to person. That’s how it works, right? Fortunately, this has been studied.

Nowadays, “human challenge trials” are used to “prove” that viruses are spread in this way. These trials are conducted in healthy, young volunteers in an inpatient environment with HEPA-filtered air in negative-pressure rooms. A virus from a sick person is “isolated and purified” (this is presumably done through a series of laughable steps, but more on that another time) and administered through intranasal drops/sprays to the healthy volunteers.

The result? Unvaccinated individuals have a roughly 25% chance of developing flu-like symptoms when receiving this so-called “viral” nasal spray.

Why not 100% you ask? Well, authors hypothesized that either the air was too humid, not enough viral particles were administered, or that people must not be as contagious once they develop symptoms.

Before these modern trials, there were studies that took the mucus, throat washings, respiratory secretions, and even blood from people with the flu and administered them directly to healthy volunteers.

The first and most cited are the Rosenau Experiments (1918-1919). Secretions and blood of people dying from the flu were rubbed into healthy volunteers’ eyes. None of the healthy volunteers got sick. Critics argued that the healthy volunteers must already have developed immunity as a consequence of prior exposure.

The second was a study conducted by Alphonse Dochez (1930). Nasal washings of patients with active colds were passed through a Berkefeld filter, which was thought to capture all particles large than viruses. This filtrate was then administered into the noses of healthy people and chimpanzees. The result: some of the humans and chimps developed symptoms.

The third commonly cited studies are known as the Common Cold Units (CCU) Studies (1940s-1980s). Nasal washings from sick patients were administered to healthy volunteers. 30-50% of the healthy volunteers developed symptoms. The researchers had expected more illness but chalked up their findings to “raw” secretions being too variable in viral load.

The point of these studies is not to prove my point but to help you appreciate how the notion that sick people contaminate healthy people is unimpressive at best. Not everybody exposed to a sick person gets “sick”. In my household, my kids get sick all the time. Sometimes my wife develops symptoms; sometimes I develop symptoms. It’s not as simple as avoiding their grubby fingers. So it’s not exactly a causative relationship.

It’s far more likely in my view that something triggers living organisms to fall apart a little bit in the colder months. A stressor might be the catalyst (the holidays are stressful), excessive drinking might be the culprit (most people drink a lot of alcohol during the holidays to cope with the stress), and the myriad of activities and obligations during the holidays leads to a lack of quality sleep (how’s your back doing after that air mattress experience at your in-laws?).

I think it’s just as likely that “catching a cold” happens when non-sick people hang around sick people as a form a co-resonance. Being in proximity with a sick person reminds a not-sick person’s energetic body that it’s time to make an offering, triggering the onset of symptoms that leads to decomposition of some of our tissues, and then this now sick person enters in resonance with a new not-sick person, and they receive the energetic signal to do the same. This type of chain reaction is hard to measure but it’s no better or worse than our conventional model of the flu given the myriad of questions around this elusive mysterious virus thing.

There doesn’t need to be an answer here, but I think it’s naive to think that we can become immune to the forces of nature if we avoid social interaction, cover our faces with masks, and inject a bunch of stuff through a needle into our arms. These could delay the onset of our annual falling part or even blunt the symptoms, but the process of falling to pieces (again: gravity overwhelming levity) could also just be seen as a part of being human.

You don’t have the flu. You are human.

You have symptoms of the flu, meaning the effects of gravity are having a greater influence on you now than they did at the 4th of July party. Plants don’t have a choice in the matter. Gravity has an obvious effect on the natural world. Humans are also a part of - and rely on - the natural world for their survival, so they, too, experience some of this tension between levity and gravity.

If we chalk this experience up to an outside viral contagion, then vaccines, nasal swabs, masks, and social isolation do, indeed, make sense.

But if the holes in the story that I’ve shown you are even a little bit interesting, then consider every autumn as an invitation to do an inventory on your life.

Have you been sleeping well?Have you been eating nutritious foods?Have you been drinking clean water? Breathing clean air?Have you been talking about hard things or suppressing your feelings?Have you been having sex that transcends beyond mere physical attraction?Have you been taking time for solitude and rest?Have you been grateful for being alive?Have you been drinking, smoking, or snorting too many drugs?Have you been nurturing healthy relationships and community?Have you been exercising too little? Too much?

Your answers to these questions will directly affect your life force energy. They can help your kundalini rise or fall. They can nourish or diminish your generative power.

I also can’t recommend enough against pharmaceuticals. Some medications may take away your symptoms short term but they interfere with your ability to get back to center. Allopathic means of keeping us healthy certainly can help with symptoms, but surgeries and pharmaceuticals weaken our generative power, meaning they make you feel as if they have fixed something but they’ve damaged your ability to sustain the influences of gravity over the long-haul.

The process of expelling old matter and decomposing a little bit (and not dying as a result) is a virtue. The symptoms are uncomfortable but they are happening for a reason. The yarrow in my backyard was born with the condition that it would lie dormant for 6 months of the year. This makes it possible to have healthy yarrow during the summer months. And as with my yarrow, the cold, winter months are a time to consider slowing down, resting, digesting, and becoming more dormant.

My wife asked me a month or so ago: Why do people all seem to get sick late in the fall if it’s not from viruses? It was this question that ultimately prompted this essay. I used to resist taking my foot off the accelerator of life, and often it would take a 3-4 day period of “the flu” to park me prostrate. It was an invitation to heal.

Call it what you will: getting sick or making an offering to Mother Earth. But the “illness” that you are experiencing is a part of being a whole human. Supporting your health through the lens of holism is the only way to survive as it generates levity, or life force energy. Salvation will likely never be found through vaccines and fever-reducers because perhaps there is nothing to be saved from.

This episode was sponsored by Born Free Method.

The Born Free Method digital playground includes over 60 hrs of pre-recorded lessons (w/ slides) spread out over 180+ lessons when you enroll. You will also be invited to a Zoom call (recorded) every other week hosted by me, Sara, and both. We also often have guest speakers, and you will have access to recordings for all 100+ of our past calls/interviews.

* 12-month access is $750

* Lifetime access is $3997 (This option comes with some other perks as well, including direct support from me and Sara for life by phone/text/email)

* Fertility Deep Dive ($499) if you just want to focus on pre-conception planning and fertility, but this content is included in both of our other offerings above.

We have payment plans available for the lifetime package, and we have discounts available for any of our programs for students and birthworkers. Just shoot Nathan and Sara an email: support@bornfreemethod.com

Work with Nathan:Support for Midwives | Private Consultation | Born Free Method | Clear & Free

Medical Disclaimer: Born Free Method: The Podcast is an educational program. No information conveyed through this podcast should be construed as medical advice. These conversations are available to the public for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Music provided by RealMovieScores / Pond5

Get full access to Born Free Method: The Podcast at nathanrileyobgyn.substack.com/subscribe